Please allow additional OTM hedge for a option sell strategy

Dear @nithin,

I’m automating a ratio spread strategy where in I would be buying 1 lot of ATM option and selling 8 lots of OTM options. The OTM options would be sold at a price 1/8th of the ATM price. For hedging, I’m also buying 7 lots of further deep OTM options. This all balance the trade nicely.

This is for normal delivery as I intend to carry the positions until weekly expiry.

Now, during the course of the day, the difference between the strikes of sold OTM and bought deep OTM may increase either on the put side or on the call side. This will increase the potential loss if the market gaps on the next day in the other direction. To reduce this risk, I would like to buy 1 or 2 additional deep OTM options. But sounds like Zerodha wouldn’t allow this for far OTM since the quantity of shorts and longs mismatch.

This is a huge issue since this strategy is automated. It may error out due to this restriction and if not monitored, can potentially lead to huge losses.

Considering this risk, it sounds a bit unreasonable why Zerodha wouldn’t allow additional hedges if the only intension of the user here is to reduce the risk and not increase it. It sounds like Zerodha is actually allowing to take this risk by putting such a restriction.

I can try to handle this tricky situation in the code by selling 2 lots of original hedged positions and then buying same quantity of new hedged positions, however, it makes the code complex and prone to errors especially when it’s running multiple strategies in the same account.

Even if this is handled through the code somehow, still it’s unimaginable why you would want user to carry positions overnight with huge risk by not allowing additional hedges?

I do understand why you have put all these restrictions, but it shouldn’t be a blanket thing. This is causing issues for traders like me who want to play safe. I hope you understand this situation and think about doing something helpful here.

Regards

Hi @bkt

This restriction is mainly because of a restriction in OI on us as a broker.

One of the ways to get around this issue is to trade through the custodial account as mentioned above. We will soon have a similar offering from Zerodha itself. @mohitmehra is working on this. Give us a few more weeks.

@nithin

This will be super helpful if this happens in a few weeks. I’m not much comfortable opening a custodian account. All my strategies are automated through Kite APIs and I don’t want to get into other unknown hassles just to solve this problem. Thank you for your quick and kind response.

Never seen a CEO responding to queries like the way you are doing. Appreciate all your efforts.

Rregards